Big-city educators get a Sarasota County STEM lesson

"It's gonna happen," teenager Ernesto Valdovinos warned as five adults peered over his shoulder to see what would be a remarkable scene at the school.

A microscopic organism defecating.

It also meant some extra credit.

Ernesto, 13, and his classmates at Heron Creek Middle School watched the moment from a digital camera attached to their microscope that displayed on the computer. They captured it on video to stick in their PowerPoint presentation.

Watching the middle schoolers' scientific work that seemed to be mostly devoid of middle school humor was a group of officials representing several large urban school districts across the country.

As part of a two-day tour that started Tuesday, the visitors — who work for city schools in Baltimore, Washington D.C., and Chicago as well the Maryland State Department of Education — are touring seven Sarasota County schools to bring ideas back home.

"We're looking for innovative approaches for STEM around the country," said Cindy Hasselbring, the special assistant to the Maryland state superintendent.

Local school officials see the visit as a sign that others from outside Florida are noticing the district's heralded STEM classrooms, a multi-year investment for the school system.

So far, refitting 75 math and science classrooms with new technology and furniture has cost about $1.875 million — or $25,000 per room — thanks to funding from the Gulf Coast Community Foundation. The district covers the $18,000 pricetag for infrastructure costs, including electrical wiring and new wiring, for each room.

With 67 rooms still left to be renovated, the district expects to finish the project in the 2015-16 year. Sarasota officials brand the STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — rooms as the "Classrooms of Tomorrow."

The group, paid for by the Broad Foundation, chose Sarasota County as their destination because the initiative was far-reaching, Hasselbring said.

Interesting lessons

A school, such as Booker Middle School, with a high percentage of students getting free and reduced lunches will have the same STEM classrooms as Sarasota Middle, where only about one-third of students getting discounted food, for instance.

"The Sarasota program is way more inclusive than any we could find," Hasselbring said Tuesday. She first heard of the district from a colleague at Texas Instruments, which has also invested in the countywide project.

What struck Traci Thibodeaux was how STEM rooms were the same — the chairs with wheels so students could move around a table, for instance.

"I'm looking at the layout," said Thibodeaux, a strategic manager with Chicago Public Schools. "I like that consistency."

Thalia Washington looked at the skills students practiced, such as asking questions or developing a hypothesis. That was just as important, she said, as the life-science lessons on microorganisms.

"It's not just the curriculum we're after," said Washington, the director of strategic initiatives for D.C. Public Schools' Office of College and Career Readiness.

Even with more than a half-dozen strangers in the room, class went on as normal Tuesday at Heron Creek Middle School.

Teachers gave instructions in the front of the room. Teenagers, largely disinterested by the adults watching behind them, wrote down data or debated their science problems.

"It's a lot of people," Jimmy Roman, a 13-year-old eighth-grader. "It's cool. We have company."